[TIP] Firefox and tmpfs: a surprising improvement

[truc]

and what if your computer hangs? you're losing, among other things, the history since the previous backup?

[El_Goretto]

and what if your computer hangs? you're losing, among other things, the history since the previous backup?

It is true with the local.stop method too isn't it?
If the computer is faily unstable I assume that both wrapper and crontab should be used... (but why using an unstable computer and trying to make it faster rather than fixing it first?) Otherwise wrapper should be enough IMHO.

[truc]

well, I may have misunderstood you a little, I thought this thread was about calling the script through a cronjob, and that's all. I didn't know about the local.{start,stop} method.

Anyway, I'm personnally calling the, let's say, firefox-tmpfs script, first in ~/.xinitrc, then in a cronjob, and with a wrapper (kind of alias ff="firefox; firefox-tmpfs")

[Compintuit]

So... If I do this, having a 44MB places.sqlite file will no longer make searching my history take about 10 secs? Would we now be talking milliseconds? Because that would be nice... but I'm still a gentoo noob, so I think I'll have to wait a bit before I try. But this has definitely worked well for some people?

[Evincar]

So... If I do this, having a 44MB places.sqlite file will no longer make searching my history take about 10 secs? Would we now be talking milliseconds? Because that would be nice... but I'm still a gentoo noob, so I think I'll have to wait a bit before I try. But this has definitely worked well for some people?

It works, indeed, and the difference here is abysmal. From 3-4 seconds chokes to near instantaneous seeking.

[loudmax]

I started a Github project based on stevenrobertson's script. The most significant changes I added are compression, sqlite vacuuming, and printing a nice usage message. It's available here: http://github.com/nickaubert/QPFox/tree/master

[Bircoph]

I don't see great benefit from this on my system.
I moved .firefox to /dev/shm and first startup time dropped from ~2.5 secs to 2.0 secs, repeated startups doesn't differ at all. Anyway, this is filesystem's job to cache I/O and ext4 does this in a nice way.

[Bill Cosby]

Agreed, with ext4 I hardly notice any improvement.

[krinpaus]

I don't see great benefit from this on my system.
I moved .firefox to /dev/shm and first startup time dropped from ~2.5 secs to 2.0 secs, repeated startups doesn't differ at all. Anyway, this is filesystem's job to cache I/O and ext4 does this in a nice way.

I too, tried this "solution", among MANY other combos, to try and improve firefox performance,
especially once updating to FF 3.5.x, with no meaningful result. (I've been running reiserfs
for years on most partitions except /boot and my media collection (xfs), and that combo
has suited me and all the systems I touch fine (except Oracle DB's those aren't on Gentoo, sadly)).

Employing NoScript and Adblock and Flashblock only helped slightly, Flashblock moreso.
. It's when I bit the bullet (lose all those cookies, etc...) and moved .mozilla to .mozilla-old
and restarted that performance improved. Evidently too much carry-over "crud" from previous versions,
including my customized settings, weren't (rightfully) in FF's best performance "interest".

I reimported my bookmarks and went back to setting up my unique logins for each site, and
all is well, I am much more satisfied (with Flashblock/NoScript/Adblock, performance or not...).

[waterloo2005]

firefox /home/steven/.mozilla/firefox/abcd1234.default tmpfs size=128M,noauto,user,exec,uid=1000,gid=100 0 0

here uid gid is about steven ?

I want to run .pack_ffox.sh when I reboot and shutdown computer .
How to do it ?

Do i need to use ordinary user to run .pack_ffox.sh ?

I know there is /etc/conf.d/local.stop , but all commands in it run as root .
How to run as ordinary user in /etc/conf.d/local.stop ?
thanks

[pierro78]

set browser.safebrowsing.enabled to false
set browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled to false

Wow I've used the 2 above settings + browser.cache.disk.enable set to false on my gentoo install on a slow (2MB/s write) sdhc card (using ext4 without journal) and I can already see a big speed improvement ! much less annoying slowdowns ... thanks for the tip !

PS :
found some more tweaks to test on my slow SDHC card gentoo install :
- toolkit.storage.synchronous set to 0 ( http://www.roytanck.com/2009/04/05/more ... ed-tweaks/ )
- browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo and browser.sessionstore.max_windows_undo to 0 (found on http://startupmeme.com/the-coolest-fire ... ig-tricks/ )
- using the SQLite Manager, under the DB Settings tab, change the "temporary data store" setting to "memory" ( http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 7&t=696145 )
- history set to max 21 days

PS2 :
eventually, even after I applied all the above tweaks, I ended using the initial tip of this thread because I still had slowdowns due to the slowness of my SDHC card. My firefox profile is about 25MB so a 64MB tmpfs is more than enough (that's a compressed tar of less than 7MB). Now my firefox is very fast and smooth ... thanks again for the tip !

[tclover]

This a simple script to take care of everything.

#!/bin/sh
#~/.ffp-pack.sh
PF=""
FFH="${HOME}/.mozilla/firefox"
die() {
echo "$1"
exit 1
}
cd "${FFH}"
[ -n ${PF} ] || PF=`basename ${FFH}/*.default`
[ -z ${PF} ] && die "profile is empty."
[ -z "`mount|grep -F ${FFH}/${PF}`" ] && { sudo mount ff-p-`id -u` ${FFH}/${PF} -t tmpfs -o user,exec,uid=`id -u`,gid=`id -g`,size=128M || \
die "failed to mount ff-p-`id -u` tmpfs."; }
[ -f "${PF}/.unpacked" ] && {
tar --exclude $PF/.unpacked -cpf $PF.tmp.tbz2 $PF || die "failed to pack the profie."
mv $PF.tbz2 $PF.old.tbz2 || die "failed to override .old profile."
mv $PF.tmp.tbz2 $PF.tbz2 || die "failed to move the profile."
} || { tar xpf $PF.tbz2 && touch $PF/.unpacked || die "failed to unpack the profile."; }

If no profile is set, the script will take care of it, mount the tmpfs and unpack the profile. Of course you'll had to manually rm your profile... The tmpfs will just be mounted over your original profile dir. There's no need for whatever fstab line. Just add the script in bashrc or in the autostart applications, so you can start browsing after loggin.
EDIT: YOU HAVE TO MANUALLY ARCHIVE YOUR PROFILE THE FIRST TIME [and rm it, because you won't need it anymore].

[patrix_neo]

set browser.safebrowsing.enabled to false
set browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled to false

Wow I've used the 2 above settings + browser.cache.disk.enable set to false on my gentoo install on a slow (2MB/s write) sdhc card (using ext4 without journal) and I can already see a big speed improvement ! much less annoying slowdowns ... thanks for the tip !

I am from a world of security-first. So I am just asking - Is this good practice? I am just curious how this will affect my browsing if I do this.